06. She Chose Me For a Reason

Part One: The Making of Emma — how a baby girl born in Gibraltar

changed a woman’s life before she even understood the words being used to

describe what was happening.

She was alone in a hospital in Gibraltar when a paediatric doctor visiting from Great

Ormond Street Hospital sat down with her and said: Emma, I’m ever so sorry to tell

you, there’s one of three things severely wrong with your daughter.

They flew home back to the UK within days. She got to Bristol Children’s Hospital, and

the consultant came in from his leave. He ran all the tests. And then he sat down and

gave her the diagnosis and the prognosis. Freya had spinal muscular atrophy, type one.

She had been such a good baby. Emma hadn’t seen it coming. None of the words they

were using meant anything to her yet. She went into robotic mode.

Tell me what this is. Tell me how you need to fix this. Give me the answers I need.

Two conversations. Two doctors. Each one worse than the last. She would become a

palliative care nurse in the years to come. She would learn the language of all of it. But

not yet. Not then. Then she was just a young woman being told that the world she had

known was gone.

From that moment, she has never been the same person.

She says this herself, simply and without self-pity, in the way she says most things. As

fact. As something that happened and must be accounted for. She was in her late

twenties. She was, she says, still a child really in her mind, and nothing she had been

through up to that point had prepared her for it. Nothing could have.

But here is what Emma knows now, at nearly forty-nine, that she could not have known

then: Freya did not leave her. She put her on the path she was always meant to be on.

And Emma walks it every single day.

* * *

The Girl from Liverpool

She was born and raised in Liverpool. Big family, lots of aunties, a mother who stopped

for everyone in the street, who helped strangers onto buses with children running

around her feet, who had a room filled with laughter. Emma grew up surrounded by

people, by noise, by the particular warmth of a working-class Scouse family that grafted

hard and let their hair down harder.

Her mum and dad met at thirteen. Her dad’s mother died when he was eight; two elder

sisters split the family rather than see them go into care. He grafted from a very young

age to provide for his own family, and he did. Emma had what she calls, with full

awareness of its rarity, a really good upbringing. A happy home. The kind you can still

go back to as an adult and feel safe.

She was a shy kid. Crazy curly hair, knee-high socks, black patent shoes. She

remembers school from a young age with the particular vividness that happy children

carry. She had friends she had known for years, a family that was always around, an

extended network through the intertwined marriages of her parents’ families. She

didn’t know how good she had it. She would find out.

When she was sixteen, her dad was made redundant. He had been working laying

cables across the South West. Her mum and dad decided to buy a bed and breakfast in

Plymouth. None of them had ever done anything like it before. And Emma, at sixteen,

the age when she should have just been starting to go out on a Saturday night in

Liverpool, packed up and started again in a city that didn’t know her.

“There’s an expectation of what a Liverpool is like. I’m very proud of my roots because it is a city of culture. But when I came here, someone at sixth form asked me what drugs I could get. I was like, I have no idea what you’re on.”

She came out of her shell because she had to. She was a girl from a big family, suddenly

very small. But she brought Liverpool with her — the graft, the loyalty, the instinct to

stop for people, the deep and unshakeable belief that kindness is not a weakness but a

way of life.

* * *

Not Necessarily the Right Decision

She was young when she met him. She got pregnant. It felt like the right thing, getting

engaged, getting married. She had Harry. And then they moved to Gibraltar, and she

fell pregnant with Freya, and she was further from her family than she had ever been,

and he was away a lot, and then a doctor sat down with her in a hospital and said the

words that changed everything.

After Gibraltar, after Bristol Children’s Hospital, after the tests and the prognosis —

Emma came home and lived between a children’s hospice and a high dependency unit

and eventually to the ‘Star born’ room where Freya was laid to rest. And Harry, four

years old and clueless, came in and read to his sister and at one point started prodding

her, saying “Mum she’s gone really hard”, and Emma thought, Christ Almighty. What

do you tell a four-year-old boy in that moment? What do you tell yourself? She told

herself - You just have to keep going.

There was a Canadian woman called Terri at the hospice. She could just see Harry. She

helped Emma because Emma didn’t know what to do and she was still being a mum to

Harry at the same time.

Freya died on the 25th of November, Harry’s birthday is the 29th of November. He

wanted hair gel and a Ben 10 party.

Emma went into town with her sister and mum and bought Harry’s birthday presents.

Her sister — nine years younger than Emma, barely more than a girl herself — was

there. She had been there through all of it. She showed up. She stayed close. She didn’t

leave.

Emma was buying gifts for Harry’s birthday and gifts for Freya to put in a coffin on the

same trip. Her sister bought Freya her first bra. They had a little party for him. Emma

kept thinking: I’ve just got to be a mum for Harry. And she was. She just was.

“I believe she chose me for a reason and that’s what gets me through. I look forward to meeting her again. One day.”

From the day Freya died, Emma was in a shell of the person she had been. She was in

a loveless marriage with a man who was never horrible to her, just never her person,

never emotionally connected in the way she needed. Her mum and dad moved to Spain.

She had nobody she trusted enough to show the real side of her grief – not properly,

not all of it. Even with her sister there, even with everything her sister had carried

alongside her through those days, there was a part of Emma that stayed hidden. She

went through years — dark years, years she describes as going to the depths — with a

face on for the world and nothing solid underneath.

She stayed for twenty years in a marriage that had been empty long before Freya. She

tried to leave many times. He was always good at bringing her back. She was raised in

a culture where you got married and you stayed. Every woman in her family had. She

didn’t know how to do anything else.

But she knew, somewhere and increasingly, that she was not happy. That she had not

been happy for a very long time. That the boys deserved to grow up knowing what a

real relationship looked like.

She left in 2018. It broke her. She is still riddled with guilt about what it did to her boys.

She owns that. She lives with it. But it was the right decision. She knows that now. She

knew it then.

* * *

When She Found Out What She Could Do

She was forty, standing in a very cold field on the moors, putting on an event. She was

an events organiser at the time. And around her were a bunch of nurses who kept

telling her she’d make a good one.

She used to pass out at the sight of blood. But she went to a hypnotherapist. Three

sessions. Then she signed up for an Access to Nursing course. Passed it. Applied for

university. Passed that too.

At university she had a tutor called Carol who terrified her, in a positive way, from the

day they met. Carol told her two things: “I’m not here to be your friend, and neither

will I ever be your friend.” And the only time she wanted to see Emma was if she had

asked to see her — not because she had been summoned. And Emma thought: I cannot

let her down. And she didn’t.

In her final year, her ex-husband took her to court. She was being assessed by social

workers about her parenting. She was doing her final placements, her final assignment,

her final exam. Something had to give. Her assignment wasn’t good enough. Carol

offered to let her tweak it.

Emma said no. She would start again. She submitted a better one.

On her graduation day Carol said she had known from the day she met her. She said

Emma just needed someone to believe in her.

“I’ve never had that before. People who’ve put that much trust or faith in me to achieve.”

The day Emma’s dad watched her graduate was the first time she saw her own worth

reflected back from him. He had always seen something in her that she hadn’t been

able to see in herself. She saw it that day. She didn’t stop.

She is now a senior registered nurse for an end-of-life organisation. She wears her

uniform with pride. When she walks into a room, she says, the atmosphere changes.

People know why she’s there. Her job is not to make their loved one better. It is to hold

their hand through what is coming. To lead the conversations, they have been trying to

avoid. To sit with the granddaughter who says about the pain she feels inside and say:

“That’s your heart breaking because your nana is dying. What you’re feeling is real”.

She can do this because she has felt it herself. She has been in that room. She knows

what it is to hold someone through the end of their life with no handbook and nowhere

to put the grief afterwards.

She cannot give a definitive answer when people ask how she does her job. She just

knows she gets up every day, puts her uniform on, and meets the people in front of her.

She only has one chance to get this right. So, she gets it right.

* * *

The Thing Edna Knew

Before all of it — before Gibraltar and the hospice and nursing school and the cold field

on the moors — there was a woman called Edna.

Emma was ten or eleven. She used to play out in the street in Liverpool — kirby,

football, roller boots. Edna was a widower, living nearby, her daughters far away. She

spotted Emma in the street playing and something connected. She took Emma to

church. Emma sang at weddings for a pound. On Saturday afternoons they baked

biscuits together at Edna’s kitchen table because her daughters lived miles away and

Emma’s own nana had died young and Edna was, in some quiet way, the extension of

that.

Emma didn’t understand, at ten or eleven, what it meant to lose a partner. She had

never met a widow before. But she stopped, and she showed up, and she gave Edna her

time. Because she thought — even then, even before she had words for it — that she

might be the only person Edna had spoken to that day.

There must be a reason why we’ve connected for that moment.

She still believes that. About everyone. About Freya. About the people she meets in

their last days. About the women in the group who found each other later in life, when

they were all going through something. About this conversation, today, right now.

Part Two of Emma’s story — the years of rebuilding, finding Lee, finding herself, and

learning to say no — will be published shortly.

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